Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis on October 20, 1968. The ceremony took place on Skorpios, the Greek island he owned, and it came five years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The match shocked a public that still thought of her as the widow in mourning.
Onassis was a shipping tycoon, one of the richest men in the world, and decades older than she was. He had courted her through the years after Dallas, and she had been hounded by photographers the whole time. The marriage offered a measure of privacy and security that the public spotlight made hard to find.
The reaction was harsh. American newspapers treated the wedding almost as a betrayal, and the contrast between the two men, the young president and the older magnate, was drawn again and again. She had a right to a life, and the public had an image it did not want to give up.
The marriage lasted until 1975. Onassis died that year. The union was not easy, and it was conducted under a press attention that never let up. After his death she returned to New York and to a quieter role as an editor in publishing.
The wedding marked the end of one era and the start of another. It showed that a woman who had been defined by a public tragedy would not stay frozen in it. The photographers who had chased her for years got their picture, and she got a life beyond the image.